Tales from BSSU
by Princess Tyler Briefs
Summary: 100 Tales from Ba Sing Se University about a certain pair of students from the Fire Nation and Water Tribe. A Sokkla 100 set. Some Sozin’s Comet spoilers.
1. Request

_**WARNING: HERE THERE BE SOME SOZIN'S COMET SPOILERS! IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE THEM, DO NOT READ UNTIL AFTER JULY 19. THAT IS ALL!**_

**A/N:** Welcome one and all to Reggie's own Sokkla100. Chances of finishing? Pretty much non-existent. Chances of you enjoying the ride anyway? Hopefully, fairly high.

Because I'm me, I'm taking this 100 thing a little differently. Instead of doing 100 completely separate stories, I'm having them all take place in the same location: Ba Sing Se University. I'm also going to try and put these in some semblance of a story that makes sense and where you can see the relationship developing instead of it just being thrown at you. 100 chapters is a lot, though, so we'll see how it goes.

**Disclaimer:** All the characters you recognize belong to Bryke. The others are mine.

**Summary:** 100 Tales from Ba Sing Se University about a certain pair of students from the Fire Nation and Water Tribe. A Sokkla 100 set. Some Sozin's Comet spoilers.

_**Tales From B.S.S.U.  
By: Reggie**_

_Chapter 1/100  
Theme: 98. Request_

* * *

"_Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will." Jawaharial Nehru_

* * *

For someone as independent as Azula was, it was shocking how little control she'd ever had over her life. From the moment she had accidentally burned her brother and Ursa had left the nursery to take care of him instead of comforting her distraught daughter—instead of believing she hadn't done it on purpose—the princess had both lost and gained control of her life.

No longer did her mother hover over her school work or check that she was practicing those things seemly to a Princess. She did not seem to care what Azula did, and soon etiquette classes were replaced, at her father's request, with more Firebending training, history, and studies of politics. She hadn't protested, Firebending was more fun than learning how to properly hold a tea cup anyway, and she barely noticed all of her free time evaporating.

With Ozai now gone, confined permanently to his prison, she had thought perhaps that she might start to gain some of the freedom back, but it had proven a vain hope.

The lose of her father, her dreams, and the limited freedom she had enjoyed, Azula had also lost her ability to Firebend. With no war, nothing left to gain or prove, the teenage princess had lost what had held her together all her life, and with it the only thing that made her truly special.

She had thought they would leave her in peace after that, and for a while they had. Zuko had seen her as no serious threat with her abilities gone, and allowed her back into the palace—though always under the strict guard of Mai and, eventually Ty Lee when she was persuaded to return. That had been a year and a half ago, after six months in prison awaiting her fate, and she had thought she could be safe and disappear.

Avatar Aang had other ideas.

He claimed he wanted only to promote peace among the nations, and felt the best way to do that was to educate them in the truth about each other. What better way to promote education, he had reasoned, than to use its highest form, Ba-Sing-Se University, as an example to all the other schools in the world?

Under pressure from the Avatar, the restored Earth King, and other leaders of the nations, the people in charge of the University had agreed. Students from each nation would be selected by the Avatar and his allies to attend the school on a trial basis, and if it proved successful then the exclusively Earth Kingdom school would open its doors to those from any nation inclined to academics.

This was all well and good, Azula supposed, but she failed to see why it was that Zuko insisted that she be one of the representatives of the Fire Nation. Perhaps he remembered the hours she had spent as a child at her studies, and assumed she had enjoyed them rather than been doing them to try and gain attention from either parent. Or, and this was more likely, he wanted her as far away from him as possible, in some remote corner of the globe where she could be constantly watched and had little chance of causing trouble even if she had wanted, or had the ability, to.

He kept insisting that it would give her a chance to start over. She would have anonymity of any other student, and would no longer have to be the Princess she was bred to be.

Zuko either seriously over estimated her desire to be someone different—because, really, she was fine the way she was—or else sore under estimated the Earth Kingdom's ability to hold a grudge. Even stripped of her title, her armies, her status, hair style, wardrobe, her companions (save Mai and Ty Lee); it was not likely the citizens of Ba Sing Se had forgotten the only person to have ever conquered their city. No one in history had done that before, and it was something she was still proud of doing regardless of who had won the whole war in the end.

It was foolishness on Zuko's part to pretend that she could have a fresh start, Azula knew this, but she could not deny a direct order from the Fire Lord without once again finding herself rotting in some cell like the worthless puppet so many people assumed she was. Azula did not know what she WAS anymore, but she did know she wasn't worthless.

She would go to Ba-Sing-Se University and Fire Lord Zuko's request, but she made no promises to enjoy herself.

* * *

When Aang requested that Sokka be one of the Water Tribe representatives in his experiment at Ba Sing Se, the teenage warrior had leapt at the chance.

It wasn't that he considered himself a brilliant academic—because he wasn't—and he certainly had no desire to return to the city he'd once viewed as a prison. He didn't really think Aang's idea would work, what with the built in loop holes created by all the 'ifs' and 'thens', and he doubted even more that this would be as fun and exciting as Aang made it sound.

It was just that he was going crazy down at the South Pole.

Sokka wasn't sure what to blame: the two years the tribe had been depending on him as it's sole provider, or the year he'd spent traveling the globe with complete freedom as the idea guy for their group. Whichever one it was, the resulting problem was simple. He needed to have something to do and he just…didn't any more.

For one hundred years the men of the Water Tribe had been raised as warriors to fight the Fire Nation. That was all there was. No one thought of being a culture leader, an architect, a scientist, or anything really but a warrior, because those things didn't matter if your home didn't exist.

Now the only path Sokka had been raised for his whole life no longer existed. Worse still, no one at home needed him any more. The men were back, and with them hunters far superior to Sokka's meager skills. His father was home to take his place as Chief once again, and there was time now for the children to play in ways he never had.

Worst of all, Katara didn't need him any more either. She was off helping Aang all the time as the Water Tribe ambassador. She was healing the scars of the world while he tried to find a niche in a place that didn't feel like home anymore.

Even Suki had returned to Kyoshi Island, as the warriors there still needed her leadership both on the Island itself and in every corner the earth kingdom. He could have gone with them, perhaps, but this was Suki's thing, and idea guy or not he would only have gotten in the way.

With each passing day Sokka was becoming more keenly aware that his home was a round hole and he was a square, and this just wasn't working no matter what his father tried to tell him.

It bothered the 18-year-old a little that he was, once again, not choosing to leave his home so much as being shoved out of it by a sense of loyalty to Aang, but who was he to argue with the most powerful force in the physical world, really?

Aang was asking him to jump into an unknown, and he would for no other reason than that.


	2. Foreign

**A/N:** Further Sokkla love! Well…the beginning of it anyway. Kind of. If you squint. The last one was more of a prologue, and this is where the real story starts.

_**Tales From B.S.S.U.**__  
Chapter 2/100  
009. Foreign_

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"_People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole shaped." Author Unknown_

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"B24…B24…where on earth IS B24?" Sokka glanced up from his paper to the rows of doors he was passing, but none of them matched the set he was looking for. This was ridiculous! He'd been wandering the twisted hallways of Ba-Sing-Se University's on campus housing for nearly an hour now. Not only had he not found the room he was looking for, Sokka highly doubted he could find the place he had started either.

Wandering this labyrinth might have been easier if it weren't for the mass of students and luggage going both directions of the tiny hallway. There were decorative trunks on the back of worn out looking servants and loudly chatting students—all of them looking older than himself—clad in green, causing congestion as they paused to greet each other, check doors, or dig keys out of their flowing robes. The whole place reminded Sokka of the Bei Fong house, and he smiled a little as he imagined the letter he would write to his little Earthbending friend. He could almost hear Katara reading it in his head: 'Dear Toph, I think I found a place populated by miniature versions of your parents. Did they graduate from Ba Sing Se University, by chance?'

It wouldn't have surprised him at all if they had because he, dressed all in blue and nearly a full head taller than anyone there, and his little rucksack of stuff felt just as out of place here as he had at Toph's childhood home. Normally, Sokka was confident just about anywhere, and didn't mind the fact that he didn't come from the most stylish place in the world. Right now, though, he was sort of wishing he could disappear because the few students who acknowledged that he was standing there did so in an obviously less than friendly way.

They made Master Pakku look like a cuddly Sabertooth Moose Lion cub!

"Someone owes me a lot of meat for this," Sokka muttered to himself, nearly dropping to his knees to avoid one of the large trunks as a servant stumbled. He was going to take Aang for everything he could on this one, that much was certain. Maybe a trip to the Fire Nation so he could get some of those sea slugs Sokka liked so much would be in order as soon as they had a break from school.

Oh yeah, that sounded like good payback. Maybe he could even get Zuko to join him in one. He hadn't had a good sit down chat with his best buddy in almost two years. The Fire Lord—Sokka still couldn't even think that with a straight face—hadn't even been kind enough to answer his written inquiry as to who it was he was sending to represent the Fire Nation. Well, not directly, anyway. All he'd said was 'Aang trusts my judgement', which was enough to nearly scare Sokka in to backing out. Zuko, and Aang, weren't telling him something and it was putting him on edge.

Or maybe that was the frustration at the matching hallways with their matching suspicious-eyed green clad snooty students doing that. That was a distinct possibility.

The nearest door said A125, which told him nothing at all. Why hadn't the lady who'd given him the scroll with his room number and class schedule been more helpful? Seriously, would it have killed her to pause for five seconds in her busy work and give him directions? This brought to his attention a problem that made Sokka shudder involuntarily. If all these people were as helpful as her, how was he ever going to find his classes? Were they hoping that Aang's proposal would fail on the merit that their experimental students all disappeared in the unknown recesses of the campus?

Sokka groaned, rolling his scroll back up, and began preparing himself for the inevitable wound to his manly pride. There was no two ways about it; he would have to ask for directions if he was going to survive this. And he was going to survive, if only to show all these people who were pretending not to see him that he was worth something.

Pretending to be casually glancing around for someone, Sokka carefully selected who he would ask. As badly as he wanted to create an awkward situation for one of the snobs who were trying to pretend he wasn't there at all, he doubted that day one was a good day to pick a fight. Instead he settled on a girl that was hovering by the stairs that kept shooting him half-hidden glances. Sokka thought he recognized her from that poetry society, but that was so long ago now he couldn't be sure.

Shouldering his bag once more, and feeling more out of his element the longer he tried to navigate the crowd, the 18-year-old Water Tribesman wound his way towards her. He assumed his best charming grin, the one that had most girls his age swooning in minutes, but this seemed to reassure her very little as she now dropped all pretenses of masking her dislike for his very presence.

Faced with this, Sokka's expression dropped, and though he'd planned to open with one of his classic lines about her beauty he found nothing more intelligent to say then, "I'm a little lost, do you think you could help me?"

"You're one of the new foreign students." She said foreign in the same way Sokka might have called a spear through the stomach a foreign object—with the distinct sense that it didn't belong were it was and the best course of action was to have it removed. "They put all of you in the new hall, across the bridge upstairs. Go up, turn left, and across the hall with no doors. You can't possibly miss it."

He didn't bother to thank her for the help, if you could call it that, as he started his way up the stairs. Sokka wasn't so sure you could call the long doorless hallway that separated the main dorms from the ones labeled 'B' a bridge. The whole complex was underground—probably a part of the original ancient subterranean city that had been the beginning of the Earth Kingdom capital—so at best it was just a creepy dark tunnel.

'How nice of them,' Sokka thought, surprising even himself with the amount of bitter sarcasm, 'to build new dorms for those of us coming from outside. Wasn't it so polite of them to make sure that we'd have accommodations all to ourselves, so far from the other students?'

It occurred to him, of course, that most of these students had probably lived in the upper ring of Ba Sing Se their whole lives—whatever the reputation the University had for academics, the Dai Li had probably kept tight control over who was allowed in and what was taught—and most of them probably had never even seen a poorer member of the Earth Kingdom, never mind an outsider, except for the Fire Nation soldiers that had invaded after the walls had fallen. In another life he might have seen their suspicion as justifiable, but it had been two years since the war ended. That was time enough to realize the world expanded far beyond their walls and rules.

The new rooms were lit rather poorly by the glowing crystals so popular in the Earth Kingdom, although the hallways were a little wider and taller, to his immense relief. There weren't many students here, just a handful of rather lost looking kids a little older than himself in ragged Earth Kingdom clothing, and a few furious looking teens, these ones actually younger Sokka was happy to note, from the Northern Tribe who were huddled together in a group outside one of the doors.

Glad to see he wasn't the only one indignant about this whole affair. He'd have to write to Aang and inform him of this whole new level of demeaning sabotage in the Avatar's attempt for world peace.

The Northern kids waved to him in greeting as he passed them by, but he recognized none of them from their brief stay there. Probably they were Waterbenders that had studied with Aang, or else young boys who had been nominated by Chief Arnook. Pity there weren't any girls; he would have liked a pretty one to talk to. He hadn't seen much of Suki in almost two years, and there was a mutual understanding that while they still liked each other that didn't mean they couldn't get to know other people. Being trapped once again in Ba Sing Se probably wouldn't help his Suki-less existence one bit, either, so at least having someone to occupy himself with would have been nice.

It sounded awful when he thought of it like that, Sokka knew, but was no less true for it.

B24, as it turned out, was at the very end of the hall. The door on the other side of the hall stood open, but as he saw no one in there he could only assume the occupants were out somewhere or else deeper in the surprisingly big room. Sokka removed the key from pouch he'd attached to his leg, and quickly unlocked the door.

A boy with long brown hair looked up from where he was carefully arranging his sheets on the bed, and green eyes lit up as they landed on his face. "Sokka! It's good to see you!"

"Haru?" The Water Tribe warrior found that he couldn't quite process either what he was seeing or his unbelievable good luck. The boy standing in front of him had filled out a little and, thankfully had decided against that awful moustache. Sokka's own endless teasing while they were at the Western Air Temple might have had something to do with that. "What are you doing here?"

"Aang suggested me to the Earth King," the younger boy answered, looking a little sheepish. "He thought I might enjoy the chance to learn more about the history beyond my village, and since this was an opportunity I would usually have I thought I might as well."

Sokka felt a small stab of sadness for Haru. He was one of the heroes of the war, but an unknown one, and rather naive about the world much beyond his village. Ba Sing Se was going to eat him alive.

He moved over to the bed on the opposite wall from where Haru was now sitting, and dropped his Koalaotter skin bag onto the bed rather unceremoniously. "It's nice to see a friendly face down here, Haru. Even better, you can dig me out if this whole place decides to collapse."

The younger Earthbender snickered, lying down flat on his bed. "I don't know if I should, Sokka. It doesn't seem fair that you're allowed to have facial hair when I'm not. Such obvious hypocrisy makes me think I should leave you here in the event of a cave in."

Sokka ran his hand over the scruff that covered his chin with a grin. He knew that with the beginnings of a beard on his face and his longer hair—the back of which nearly reached his shoulders while the front fell easily in his eyes when it was out of it's wolf tail—he no longer looked like the little boy he had been when they first stumbled onto Haru practicing his Earthbending so long ago. "The difference between us, Haru, is that I make this look good."

This was met with a noncommittal grunt from the other boy, but if he was going to say anything else it was forgotten as the sound of high pitched giggling reached them through the open door from acrossed the hall.

"This place is perfect for you, Mai! You don't even have to speak to anyone if you don't want to."

"…I know that voice," Sokka whispered, not at all sure how he felt about this revelation. That giggle, the face attached to it, still held too many memories of watching his little sister in danger, powerless without her bending, and him unable to help her. "But that can't be right…"

Aang trusted his judgement indeed! Zuko just knew Sokka would be furious when he found out that the Fire Lord had sent his girlfriend and the weird happy girl as his representatives. Did he even WANT this plan to succeed?

Grumbling to himself, wishing desperately that Aang hadn't convinced him to leave behind the new arsenal of weapons he'd gathered Sokka went to go close the door and try to forget he'd ever seen those accursed dangerous ladies.

With his hand on the knob, however, he froze. He could see Mai and Ty Lee sitting on two of the beds, with Ty Lee looking considerably happier about all this than her companion, but they weren't the only two in the room. There was a third girl there, leaning on the door frame with her arms folded acrossed her chest and looking even more miserable than Zuko's gloomy girlfriend.

Her hair was cut shorter, about chin length like Suki's except for the shorter bangs in front, and she was dressed in the standard uniform of green for Ba Sing Se University students, but for Sokka there was no forgetting those gold eyes or the mostly hidden smug pull of her mouth. No amount of change in her appearance could hide Princess Azula from him.

Sokka stood there, mouth hanging slightly agape while his mind searched desperately for the words of fury he wanted to send Zuko's way, and the younger girl looked up. Sokka saw recognition flicker through her eyes after a moment of confusion, and she stepped back in to the room with a scowl of rage.

Both her door and Sokka's slammed in unison, echoing down the hall.


End file.
